The Mountain Ash meeting in Wales held special meaning for him. Ten years earlier, a much less political but nonetheless instinctively egalitarian Robeson had impulsively joined a group of Welsh miners demonstrating in London when he ran into them while coming out of a posh affair dressed in a dinner jacket. In the years since, his identification with the Welsh had grown—with their ethnic insistence, their strength of character, their political radicalism. His strong bonds with the people of the Rhondda Valley would endure for the rest of his life, and the film he was soon to make about the Welsh miners, The Proud Valley, would always be the one in which he took the most pleasure. In 1938 at Mountain Ash, seven thousand people gathered to commemorate the thirty-three men from Wales who had died in Spain. Veterans of the International Brigade marched behind the flags of Wales and Republican Spain onto a platform filled with one hundred black men, women, and children from Cardiff, as well as a group of orphaned Basque children. The speakers included the Dean of Chichester and Arthur Horner, president of the South Wales Miners’ Federation, who introduced Robeson to the audience as “a great champion of the rights of the oppressed people to whom he belongs.” Robeson sang, recited two poems Langston Hughes had composed in Spain, and told the audience, “I am here because I know that these fellows fought not only for Spain but for me and the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here.” The audience gave him a standing ovation.36
Robeson had next planned a trip to Australia for a recital tour, but it had to be called off because of the uncertainty of the political situation in Europe. In April 1939, though, he and Larry Brown did manage a brief Scandinavian trip, performing in Oslo, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, where enthusiastic crowds turned the concerts into anti-Nazi demonstrations. Then, in May, Robeson sailed for a two-month stay in the States, perhaps at the prompting of his lawyer, Robert Rockmore—increasingly his confidant and business manager—who felt concerned that he “has been away so long that I am afraid that he may lose his so-called American audience, which, as you know, at best is a very fickle one.” Robeson had wanted to make a trip to New York anyway to discuss with Oscar Hammerstein II the possibility of doing the play John Henry, and while there he agreed to do some concert engagements and also to appear in what turned out to be a well-received week-long revival of The Emperor Jones (directed by Gig McGhee) at the Ridgeway Theater in White Plains.37
Soon after arriving in New York, he told the Sunday Worker that,
Having helped on many fronts, I feel that it is now time for me to return to the place of my origin—to those roots which, though imbedded in Negro life, are essentially American and are so regarded by the people of most other countries.… It is my business not only to tell the guy with the whip hand to go easy on my people,… but also to teach my people—all the oppressed people—how to prevent that whip hand from being used against them.
Robeson was besieged by requests for additional interviews and public appearances, but hid out at the McGhees’ apartment. No one could find him—and everyone seemed to be trying. Alexander Woollcott wanted to take him to lunch, Max Yergan wanted to discuss a pending conference on Africa, NBC wanted to discuss the possibility of radio dates, and Walter White wanted him to speak at the thirtieth annual conference of the NAACP. What Robeson wanted was to conserve his energy and call his own shots. “Nobody can find you,” Essie wrote in consternation from London—which was precisely how Paul had planned it. But his inaccessibility did ruffle some feelings. Carl Van Vechten was so put out over Paul’s failure to contact him that Essie had to write a lengthy apology, diplomatically claiming that Paul “feels terrible” about “the mess he made of things while he was in America.”38
He did not. And Carlo knew he did not. “There is no word from Paul that HE is sorry,” Van Vechten wrote his wife, Fania, “It’s pretty obvious that Paul doesn’t want to see us very much, or most of his old friends.” “There is only one thing to do,” Carlo decided, “and that is refrain from flattering them by letting them think we are MAD.” Two days later, still smarting despite his resolution not to, Carlo returned to the subject in another letter to Fania,
The point about Paul is that he only wants to talk about himself and how he’s improving and how he is working on new songs and he can’t talk to his old friends that way because they’ve heard this story so long: so he hunts up new ones to listen.… There is no earthly use in going into all this because it is a matter of indifference whether we see him or not.… If they want to call up and come round in the fall, why let them. I don’t think they will bother us much. Essie’s whole idea is to keep us from getting sore, because she knows that would do Paul harm, but the other people he has treated like this will do him more harm.
In reply, Fania, who shared her husband’s distaste for being ignored, let go with an accumulated backlog of venom against Paul:
[He is] weak, selfish, indulgent, lazy—really if it were not for his meagre talent and his great charm he would be just the traditional “lowdown worthless nigger”—is in spite of himself thoroughly ashamed of his failure to function as a worthwhile and fine human being when he was on his own, without needing Essie to “remind him” and prod him along. I feel sorry for him in a way. But I think it’s about time Essie “reminded” him that even HE can’t treat his friends with large doses of indifference and neglect and expect to keep them. We understand him. Besides we don’t give a dam [sic]. But his other American Buddies perhaps won’t take his behavior so lightly. In any case, they will talk about it, and HOW we will keep silent; as you say, in the Fall it’s all up to them. More and more I admire Essie.… He’s utterly consumed with his own importance. Nobody else matters. I say to HELL with people like that!39
Paul, having established his own set of priorities, went about meeting them. One was to contact Angelo Herndon, the black Communist who had been arrested in Atlanta in 1932 for leading a biracial demonstration of the unemployed and been sentenced by an overtly racist trial judge to eighteen to twenty years on a chain gang. In 1935 the Communist Party—after the Supreme Court had refused to hear Herndon’s appeal—had led a petition drive in his behalf that attracted “united-front” support from Communists and non-Communists alike, and had led in 1937 to the Court’s narrowly overturning Herndon’s conviction. Benjamin Davis Jr., the black Harvard graduate and the son of a wealthy Atlanta real-estate operator, had served in the 1932 trial as Herndon’s attorney (and would himself later rise into the CPUSA hierarchy). Reading of the trial in the London papers, Robeson resolved “to learn how a man did that in the heart of Georgia.” He and Davis had at least met in the early twenties, but as he wrote him many years later, after the two men had long been close friends, “Your courageous example in the Herndon case was one of the most important influences in my life.” During his trip to New York, Robeson not only saw Ben Davis but also volunteered his services to Herndon in support of the Negro Youth Congress’s current drive to place five hundred new black voters on the county list in Birmingham, Alabama. Herndon was unable to take up Robeson’s offer to help raise money because, as he wrote him, “the people who would make such an affair a success” could not be contacted on short notice.40
While in New York, Robeson also scouted for suitable new properties. Prior to leaving London, he had turned down the lead in Maxwell Anderson and Kurt Weill’s Eneas Africanus, reacting negatively to the patronizing story of an ex-slave’s eight-year effort to locate his former plantation—and to the condescension of Anderson’s covering letter, which referred to the slave as never having been “obliged or encouraged to make an ethical decision for himself” or having “to worry about” any “responsibilities.” Robeson had been more excited by a possible new play by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward (authors of Porgy and Mamba’s Daughters) about the black insurrectionary Denmark Vesey; from London, Essie seconded his enthusiasm: “I like the Vesey conception because I feel it IS what you think and feel, and you could therefore go for it in a big way.”41
While in New York
Robeson met with Langston Hughes and heard part of his blues opera, De Organizer, which Labor Stage planned to put on in the fall. He also checked out the Harlem Suitcase Theatre, affiliated with the International Workers Order (the CP’s fraternal society), whose first production, Langston Hughes’s agitprop drama Don’t You Want to Be Free?, had opened in 1938 and attracted an enthusiastic following in Harlem. Essie thought that play “ineffective” and “definitely amateur,” but she agreed that soundings made to Paul about plans (which never matured) for a Langston Hughes-Duke Ellington musical, Cock o’ the World, were “very intriguing.” As Paul considered various prospects, Essie supported his determination not to accept a trifling role: “You are now too aware, too definite minded, too militant.… You couldn’t do a small person, because you are too big, inside and out. Amusing, mischievous, rascally trifling—yes. But permanent inherent trifling—no.”42
The new project that finally crystallized carried no danger of being trifling. Michael Balcon, head of Ealing Studios, announced in the spring of 1939 that he had persuaded Robeson to return to films. He would play the lead role in a fictionalized story about the life and plight of the Welsh miners, as told through the eyes of David Goliath, an unemployed American black who, through a series of plausible accidents, goes to work in the Welsh mines and becomes centrally involved in the miners’ struggle for a better life. The youthful Pen Tennyson, hired as the film’s director, told the press that Robeson would not be used as “a negro or a famous singer”; he would play the role of a penniless man who lands a job in the Welsh mines and shares the life of a poor Welsh family—“It is a real life story showing Robeson as a simple, likeable human being, who has to take the rough with the smooth, the same as all of us.” The prescription was ideally suited to Robeson’s political vision. It remained to be seen whether good politics could be translated into good art.43
Shooting on David Goliath (the title was later changed to The Proud Valley) was due to begin in August. To trim off some pounds before going in front of the cameras, Robeson entered a “nature-cure” rest home as soon as he returned to London in July. His weight, as he reached age forty, had been gradually increasing until, in Essie’s view, “all semblance of that grand figure has long since disappeared under bulk.” She had been pestering him to go on a diet, but he ignored her until friends in New York who hadn’t seen him in years joked about how he had lost his figure and become “an Ox.” He stayed in the rest home—a mansion with 150 acres of grounds—for a full four weeks, subjecting himself to a repetitive round of electrical baths, massages, fasts, and colonic irrigations, and emerged “feeling like a million.”44
He also emerged into a full-scale European war. The news in August 1939 that Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler proved shattering to some believers in the revolutionary purity of Soviet ideology, but Robeson publicly stated that the pact “in no way whatsoever” “weakened or changed” his convictions. He saw the Nazi-Soviet agreement as having been forced on Russia by the unwillingness of the British and French governments “to collaborate with the Soviet Union in a real policy of collective security”—in his notes he recorded his certainty that an Anglo-Russian pact “would have stopped Nazi aggression”—leaving the U.S.S.R. with no alternative way of protecting its borders from a German attack. But if the pact provided the Soviets with some security, it provided the Nazis with more. On September 1, 1939, Hitler’s battalions moved into Poland, plunging Europe into war.45
Essie, with typical efficiency, had been stocking up on supplies for a year. Now, with the sky full of barrage balloons, civilian police manning clogged traffic points, anti-aircraft guns going up on building tops, sandbags against windows, the Robesons decided it was time to return home. They delayed passage only until the shooting on The Proud Valley could be completed. Essie drove Paul out to the studio early each morning, and he came home in the dark every evening by underground. The routine was exhausting, tension compounded because of air-raid precautions and blackouts, and because Paul, between takes, had to squeeze in recording sessions for His Master’s Voice. Even so, he pulled no star turn on the set, indulged in no histrionics. On the contrary, his fellow actors found him (in the words of one of them, Rachel Thomas) “so easy to work with, so easy to get on with. No temperament at all.” In the view of another cast member, Roderick Jones, Robeson’s concern centered on his fellow actors, not himself: when his stand-in was kept hanging around for hours under hot lights while the technical people made their adjustments, Robeson—without raising his voice or losing his temper—told them, “Now look, this has got to stop. You can’t keep these people waiting around like this all the time.”46
On September 25 the film was completed; on September 28 Robeson saw a rough cut and was delighted with it; on September 29 Essie sent off twenty-four pieces of luggage to the boat train; and on the morning of September 30, Pauli in tow, the family bid goodbye to London.47
CHAPTER 12
The World at War
(1940–1942)
When the Robesons docked in New York in mid-October 1939, their old friends Minnie Sumner, Bob Rockmore, and Bert McGhee were waiting for them. So was a small battalion of reporters. Robeson had prepared a written statement—suggesting his high level of concern for being quoted accurately—but the statement itself was anything but cautious. He referred contemptuously in it to “those Munich men” (Chamberlain and Daladier) whose supineness had served to abet fascist aggression in Spain, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Ethiopia; still in power, they were prosecuting a war, in the name of democracy, that was in fact aimed at saving Germany from her own leadership, in order ultimately to secure her support for a crusade against the Soviet Union. (“The gentlemen of Munich,” Robeson wrote in his private notes, “are seeking to preserve … a Nazi Germany with one exception—without Hitler.… It is interesting in this connection to note the campaign in the pro-Munich conservative press, to build up Goering by pointing out that he is a gentleman—not a proletarian sign painter like Hitler, that he hunts … that a Germany headed by Goering could get peace terms.”) A Western triumph in a subsequent conflict with the Soviet Union would, in Robeson’s opinion, mean the continuing dominion of a colonial spirit scornful of Asians and Africans and devoted to maintaining oppressive foreign control over their countries. He could see no reason, therefore, for blacks anywhere, or for the United States as a nation, to take part in a dispute that was lining up as fascist versus communist.1
Robeson’s remarks were reprinted in the British press and infuriated, among others, Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. Though an acquaintance of the Robesons, Beaverbrook let it be known that his newspapers would refuse to advertise or review Robeson’s forthcoming picture, The Proud Valley. The London columnist Hannen Swaffer, also a Robeson acquaintance, joined in the denunciation of him, prophesying that his ill-timed remarks—“after all, this country is now fighting for its existence”—would mean the end of his career in Britain. Undaunted, Robeson in the next few months repeated and expanded his views to reporters. In his opinion, the massing of Western imperialists (calling themselves “democracies”) for a showdown against the Soviets warranted Russia’s decision to march into Poland and Finland. He characterized the Soviet moves as “defensive,” a response to the “reactionary” influence Britain had been exerting in Scandinavia and to the pending alignment of Western Europe—including the “purified” new regimes expected to replace Hitler and Mussolini in Germany and Italy—against the “threat” of Bolshevism. The Soviet Union’s subsequent peace treaty with Finland, Robeson insisted, proved that the Russians had been interested only in securing strategic border points. Robeson was not alone in holding “the men of Munich” in contempt. English socialists with whom he said he had “discussed causes and conditions of the European conflict,” such as Harold Laski, J. B. Priestley, H. G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw, shared that estimate. Robeson’s views were also shared by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, the World War I ace, who in a spee
ch at the Engineer’s Club made exactly the same prediction Robeson had about the pending political realignment in Europe—though, unlike Robeson, he applauded the coming crusade against Communism.2
Robeson insisted that in making his remarks he was speaking neither as a Communist nor even as a fellow traveler, but, rather, as someone who subscribed to the philosophy of “real democracy” and spoke “from the point of view of the son of a slave,” aware and concerned about issues affecting the fate of millions of subject black people in the world. But his views did parallel those of the Soviet leadership, and one black reader wrote to the New York Amsterdam News in protest: “No, Paul old boy, you can’t expect right thinking people whether they be black or white to denounce Hitler and Mussolini for their sordid deeds, and acclaim Joe Stalin for his depredatory acts.” Claude McKay also rebuked him. McKay had been to the Soviet Union ten years before Robeson and, like him, had, as a black man, been fêted and acclaimed; unlike him, McKay had become rapidly disenchanted. He now took to print to chastise Robeson publicly for not seeing “beyond the pleasantries with which the Soviets deluge a much wanted guest,” for his uncritical approach toward a Soviet state grown “mindlessly cruel and powerful,” persecuting its own peasantry, suppressing its trade unions, sentencing “its intellectual minorities to a death purge”—and setting out to destroy “the cooperative and semi-social democratic regime of its little neighbor Finland.” It was nonsense, McKay claimed, for Robeson to defend Russia because it was “a land free of prejudice against Negroes.” There had never been any such prejudice, McKay argued, not even under the czarist regimes—“Before the Revolution an American Negro was the popular proprietor of the most fashionable cabaret in Moscow.” The true “minority parallel,” McKay insisted, was between the American treatment of blacks and the Russian treatment of Finns: “Stalin’s attack upon Finland is as vicious as Crackers lynching Negroes under the assumption that they are all rapists.” Hailing Finland as “a valiant fighting minority nation,” McKay called upon the Afro-American minority to lend its support to the Finnish cause.3
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